biegungen im ausland present a concert evening that is all about horizontal stringed instruments. Berlin's inside piano player Andrea Neumann works in the border areas of composition and improvisation, of electronic and manually generated music. While exploring the piano for new sound possibilities, she began to reduce the instrument to the strings, the soundboard and the cast-iron frame. On this disassembled, with the help of electronics amplified and alienated piano rest she developed numerous own playing techniques, sounds and preparations.

deepseafishK are the composers and pianists Juun, Katharina Klement and Manon Liu Winter. They dive into the instruments’ insides. K as in keys, instruments as pianos, naked piano interiors, clavichords. A world made of wood and metal in which activity ensues; movements that lead to sounds. Finely spun sounds, but also some that were scraped off the instruments with great tension or hammered out of them. Sometimes very close and rustling dry; sometimes spacious and almost eerie with the sound boxes’ dark echoes; often in whirring superpositions. The listener “swims” in a micro- and macrocosm of sound filled with an energy that constantly oscillates between fragility and vehemence. Massive blocks of sound abruptly start to shift, particles scatter, and suddenly, everything is infinitely fragile. But soon, the next point of culmination is here with an incontrovertible “this way and no other”. Singular events always appear in the context of a larger structure; the whole responds to the details and the details to the whole. In spite of its irrepressible force, the music appears to be finely chiseled. Sounds that at first seem arbitrary are more and more loaded with meaning, only to unerringly be stripped of it later, to the extent that one thinks the music must have been fully composed. Curtailing the choices of media and steadfastly refusing to be the target of associations leads to a larger range of attainable options, to a surprising freedom coupled with the knowledge that anything that could happen will be the one and only way it could have been.(Stephan Sperlich)